Canadian road trip is a geography class on wheels

The Sleeping Giant and the harbour at Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Photograph by: Jean Rath
, For Postmedia News

When I first started thinking about taking a road trip to visit my Prairie-dwelling daughter, I knew that the only reasonably convenient time to go was the first two weeks of September. I waffled. Could I really delay the start of my 14-year-old son's school by two weeks? Then it hit me: wait a minute, this is school! It was about time he learned some Canadian geography.

Although I was a little nervous about all the driving, I reminded myself that many have done such a thing before - notably: my mom, from Montreal to Calgary in a second-hand Volkswagen bus with four young children, and my grandmother, from Victoria to Montreal in a Volkswagen beetle with a Siamese cat.

Now it was my turn, from Ottawa to Saskatoon in a Toyota Matrix with one reluctant teenager. We can only guess which of these is the more difficult scenario.

When tackling Canada, it's good to have an early start. We set out on the official first day of school. By the time schoolchildren were getting on their buses for the first time this school year, we had already travelled a considerable distance up the Ottawa Valley and had made the important discovery that the Deep River Tim Hortons serves ice cream. That was only the beginning.

I had prepared for this two-week geography lesson by borrowing from the library and reading The Key study guide: Geography of Canada 9 Academic. From the study guide, I knew that I had to teach my son about Canada's natural resources. On this trip, that was easy. After leaving Deep River and the Ottawa Valley, we eventually arrived in Sudbury and stopped to visit Dynamic Earth, where we toured an old mine. Just to make this museum-like tour more real, the Inco Superstack and its slag heap were in full view across the highway from the huge window of the cafeteria, to be easily observed while sipping slushies.

In Sudbury, I could also briefly cover the subject of ecology, since the forested Sudbury that I saw on this trip was very different from the one that I travelled through on the train in 1975, when I was about my son's age. Back then, I had been struck by Sudbury's barren moonscape. According to one staff member at Dynamic Earth, there has been an effort made to rehabilitate the region and return it to its original greenery.

The Key mentions transport systems, an important part of any country's geography. These are intricately connected to natural resources and, as our trip continued, we were exposed to more of both. On the curvy, two-lane Trans-Canada through Ontario, we passed many logging trucks struggling up the hills. In Thunder Bay, standing in a hilltop park with a view of the harbour, we saw plenty of lake ships between us and the Sleeping Giant.

I grew up beside the first lock on the Seaway navigation system: St. Lambert. My son has seen ships going through it. Here, he could see where many of those ships end up.

On the Prairies, natural resources were in full view, whether it was fields of wheat and canola or the potash processing plants chugging away in the distance. It was harvest time and the combine harvesters looked impressive as they made their way, sometimes three abreast, across the fields. On the two-lane highway to Saskatoon, we encountered a harvester that took up his lane and most of ours and was scarier than Frank in Pixar's Cars movie.

Agriculture as a natural resource was reinforced by a trip to the wonderful Western Development Museum in Saskatoon. Until I visited that museum, I had no idea there were, and ever had been, so many varieties of tractors. On our way home, travelling the Trans-Canada through Manitoba, we had a chance to observe some emerging resources when we found ourselves travelling side-by-side with a freight train pulling Canpotex (potash) cars on our right, while spending several minutes passing a huge wind farm on our left.

A feature of any road trip is the music you listen to in the car. In my case, it was the playlist on my son's iPod. This includes the Canadian comedic band The Arrogant Worms; if The Key thought that I should teach about Canadian ecozones and their land formations, this band helped. As we made our way slowly through Ontario, we could sing along topically to their song about Canada:

'Cause we've got

Rocks and trees

And trees and rocks

And rocks and trees

And trees and rocks

And rocks and trees

And trees and rocks

And rocks and trees

And trees and rocks

And WATER! - which was all we saw for hours and hours on the highway. There were so many lakes that the people naming them must have run out of ideas; we passed three in a row called Mom Lake, Dad Lake and Baby Lake. The road through Ontario was wild and lonely, but it was also lined with ever-present and encouraging Inukshuks, perched on cliffs over the highway. Built by people but made of Canadian Shield rock, they were a bit of social studies thrown into the geography lesson.

On the Prairies, we got a quick education in meandering river formations when, while driving in a straight line (which is generally how one drives on the Prairies), we crossed the Whitemud River in Manitoba five times. The other piece of Prairie river that we got to experience happened right in Saskatoon. A sandbar had been randomly left behind in the city by the spring floods and crowds had flocked to it with picnic baskets and volleyball nets, even though it was not an official beach. My son, Saskatoon-based daughter and I spent a delightful hour splashing in the South Saskatchewan River in the unseasonably hot September weather, and enjoying, along with the crowds, this temporary Saskatoon moment.

To teach Canadian geography is to emphasize that Canada is really, really big - which, by the way, is another Arrogant Worms singalong song. By the time we had spent more than two days just getting out of Ontario, that lesson was learned. The days in the car were long; therefore one particular regional difference, due to landscape, was of great interest to us: We poked along through the Ontario Canadian Shield at 90 kilometres an hour, then zipped across Saskatchewan at 110.

The fact that we have different time zones in our country is a great way to emphasize its size. On our last half-day in Ontario, we stopped at a time-zone marker, which was right beside the highway and mounted on amethyst stones. My son climbed onto it and enjoyed the sensation of being three feet away from me and one hour behind.

During the summer, Saskatchewan is another hour behind Manitoba. On our first day heading home, as we drove east through Saskatchewan, my son was hungry by 10:30 a.m., so he invoked Manitoba time and convinced me to stop for an early lunch. Not only had he experienced the concept of time zones, he had figured out how to use the knowledge to his advantage.

Under instruction from The Key, I kept my eyes open for wildlife. A highway trip doesn't allow for much of that, but even if we never spotted a moose in Ontario, there were plenty of highway signs warning us that they were there! Wildlife-viewing on highway trips is unfortunately rather morbid. In Saskatchewan, we did see a dead moose by the side of the road.

Fortunately, we had plenty of opportunity to get close to live Canadian creatures at the Saskatoon Zoo. Although the lynx was fast asleep in the shade, looking like a harmless pet cat, the grizzly bear was enjoying a dip in the pool in full view of zoo visitors and was huge and scary, even behind bars. The prairie dog, out guarding his hole, was suitably darling. We also got to see owls, hawks, caribou and a lazy badger sleeping in the sun. Such creatures as the lion and the yak were fun, but not part of our Canadian geography lesson.

According to The Key, the teaching of geography includes a discussion on population and the movement of people. Canada's increasing urbanization was easily seen in the numerous abandoned buildings we saw every day in the small towns and rural areas we drove through, as well as motels and old restaurants and the odd farm house - and these were just the ones that could be seen from the highway.

I also found out that I, an urban Easterner, needed an education about population distribution after turning off the Trans-Canada at Portage la Prairie, Man. With an anxious eye on my half-empty (not half-full) gas tank, I wondered how much commerce there was between Portage la Prairie and Saskatoon. It turns out there's lots: the Prairie portions of Manitoba and Saskatchewan are more heavily populated than I had thought.

At the end of the trip, after more than a week of beautiful and relentless Prairies, it felt like home when we once again arrived in heavily forested Ontario, and then again when the comforting Ottawa Valley enfolded us. I considered our hands-on geography lesson to be a success for both myself and my son. We were glad to arrive back in Ottawa - but not before stopping for ice cream in Deep River.

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